Page 24 of Betrayed Auctioned Mate

I stand there, my mouth open, but nothing comes out. Keira is the only person who I ever felt I could truly, openly speak to. Now, that’s gone.

Keira’s eyes narrow as she watches my silence stretch on.

“That’s what I thought,” she mutters bitterly. “You’re still the same. You don’t care enough to even try, do you?”

“No, that’s not it!” I finally manage, my voice rising, though it sounds pathetic even to my own ears. “I care—I care more than you know. But everything got so messed up, Keira. I didn’t know how to—”

“Stop,” she says. Her voice drops, quieter now but still edged with steel. “Just stop. I’m done with this. I’m done with you trying to play hero when all I needed was for you to be there. But you weren’t. And I can’t keep pretending like any of this is okay, or like I’m okay, or like it’s going to be fine when it isn’t, and it’s not.”

The wall she has built between us expands before my eyes. I see bricks pile atop its battlements, obscuring my view of the other side. She’s gone. I see that now. Maybe she was always gone.

She steps back, her gaze hardening. “I’m leaving, Ado. I’m done with this conversation. Don’t follow me.”

Before I can react, she turns on her heel and walks away, her boots clicking against the floor as she disappears aroundthe corner. I’m left standing in the empty hallway, something roaring inside me, an impending storm. Or maybe the storm has already passed, and now, I have to live with the aftermath. Maybe I knew it all along. I still feel the echo of her words reverberating inside my ears.

A hand claps down on my shoulder, and I turn to see Percy standing beside me. His expression is soft with understanding.

“You’re an idiot,” he says, but there’s no malice in it. “Go after her.”

I blink, trying to process his words. “She—”

“I know what she said,” Percy interrupts. “But if you don’t go after her now, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.”

He squeezes my shoulder before letting go and walking past me, leaving me alone in the hallway. I stand there, his words settling inside me.Go after her.

I breathe out, running a hand through my hair. Maybe he’s right. Maybe this is my last chance to make things right.

Before I can talk myself out of it, I turn and head in the direction Keira vanished.

Chapter 13 - Keira

The mist over Halfmoon Lake is thick enough in the pale afternoon light that I cannot make out Attlefolk on the other side of the shining water. The surface shimmers in the fading daylight, and the fog wraps everything in a blanket of quiet.

The Rosecreek Bottoms has quickly become my favorite spot in the town—isolated, untouched by the chaos of the rest of the world, and permanently beautiful, as if suspended in time. A place where I go to think, or to try not to.

I’ve been decidedly tryingnotto think since the argument with Ado. I walked out on him, left him standing in the hallway. I haven’t stopped moving since. But here, by the lake, with nothing but the sound of the water lapping at the shore and the soft rustle of leaves in the trees, my thoughts catch up to me.

It’s hard not to think about what happened all those years ago—my time in captivity, the cold cell, the suffocating darkness, the way every noise made my heart race because I never knew if it meant help was coming or if it meant something worse. I can still feel the rough concrete floor beneath me, the smell of damp and rot. The hunger gnawing at my insides, the thirst that made my lips crack and bleed. Worst of all, the waiting. Waiting for rescue. Waiting for something to change.

But nothing did. Not until the visits with food and water stopped altogether, and I realized the compound I was imprisoned under had been abandoned. I was on my own.

To this day, I am still on my own. Sometimes, the world fools me into thinking otherwise, but I know the truth.

When I finally got out, I did that alone, too. I wasn’t the same. I didn’t even recognize myself in the mirror. I was hollowed out; broken in ways I didn’t know how to fix. I buriedmyself in the work, got lost in New York, and never tried to get found again—anything that would keep me from feeling too much, from remembering too much.

But you can only bury things so deep before they claw their way back to the surface.

Ado doesn’t understand. How could he? He wasn’t there. He didn’t see what I went through. And now he thinks he can situate himself back in my life and make everything better with a few words? I wish he knew it’s not that simple. Trust doesn’t come easy for me anymore; after everything that’s happened, it’s even harder with him. Especially when he refuses to tell me what I crave most to know.

I take a deep breath, trying to push my resentment away, but it clings to me like the mist, settling in my clothes, my hair. I shake my head and resume walking along the shoreline, hoping the movement will help clear my head.

The soft, comforting hiss of water retreating along the sand after each lap of the wave against the bank welded me back together. I focus intently on the sound, trying to let it into my soul.

Then I hear it—a faint rustling in the underbrush up ahead.

My breath catches in my throat, and I freeze, listening intently. It could be an animal, but I know intrinsically it’s a person. I know the smell of a shifter.

I step forward cautiously, my senses on high alert. As I approach the trees, a faint, metallic scent hits my nose—blood.

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